


Brief Encounter

by IdrisTardis7878



Category: NCIS: Los Angeles
Genre: Deeks & Nell Friendship, Gen, Mmmkay?, brotp: shaggy & velma, just a hint of densi, lawyer!au, this does NOT take place in the show's universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-04
Updated: 2018-12-04
Packaged: 2019-09-07 04:38:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16847287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IdrisTardis7878/pseuds/IdrisTardis7878
Summary: Just a little lawyer!Deeks and lawyer!Nell AU set in a gigantic LA-based law firm. After bonding over their mutual disdain for a fellow colleague's "extracurricular activities" in the company's best copy room, Deeks and Nell become fast friends. When Nell wants to set Deeks up with an art curator friend of hers, things don't go so well...or do they?





	Brief Encounter

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written as prompt fulfillment for tumblr user anthonystan on August 18, 2014. Rating is mainly for language and a tiny bit of suggestiveness.

The first thing Deeks noticed as he approached the firm’s main copy room was the thumping.

Heavy and repetitive, it echoed down the corridor as he trudged towards the small room, his arms protesting under the weight of the gigantic pile of case files he was carrying. As he got closer to his destination, the second thing he became aware of was the cursing. Loud and creative, the strings of expletives were interspersed steadily with the thumping.

 _Crap_. He thought to himself, his footsteps slowing as he realized what must be happening just out of sight behind the small room’s flimsy door.  _I **have** to get this stuff done tonight, and with my luck that douche Parish from Corporate is in there with one of the secretaries. Again._

Dropping his head and huffing out a sigh of resignation, Deeks contemplated whether or not it would be worth it to go down two floors to the even smaller copier station in the Arbitration and Mediation division – they were older machines and really slow, and as it was already well past closing time the prospect was  _not_  appealing, but he  _did_  have to finish the work on this case and it really couldn’t wait. He’d just made up his mind that he would have to suffer through the delays going downstairs would bring, when the door to the copy room swung open and a disheveled redhead –  _not_ a secretary, but a junior associate he vaguely recognized – came stomping out, her clothing slightly askew.

She let out another loud expletive before turning and catching sight of him, her expression morphing from angry to sheepish in an instant. “Uh…hi. Didn’t know anyone else was still here,” she muttered, wiping one hand across her forehead and trying to push several unruly pieces of hair behind her ears.

Surprisingly, given the assumptions he’d made, she seemed to be fully clothed and more to the point – he noted when he stepped closer and peered into the room – she was alone. Now  _he_  was the one feeling sheepish. Clearing his throat, he glanced at her before nodding down at the armful of case files he was still holding. “Yeah, uh, last minute affidavit hell. You?”

The petite woman chuckled, crossing her arms over her chest. “Copyright infringement suit that’s taken a turn for the worse. And that was  _before_  the best copier decided it wanted to turn half of my documents into confetti.”

“Ouch,” he winced in sympathy. “That explains the sailor’s vocabulary, then.”

She laughed, shrugging and ducking her head. “Uh, yeah, sorry about that. I can only imagine what it must have sounded like to you.”

He opened his mouth to retort that she probably wasn’t imagining what he’d  _actually_  been thinking, but he caught sight of her mischievous smile and the twinkle in her eyes and realized that, yeah, she probably  _had_  guessed. Chuckling, he grinned at her. “Well, you really  _were_  getting into it. It kinda sounded like-”

“-Parish was dipping into the secretarial pool again?” she asked, grinning back at him.

“Uh, yeah.”

“He’s  _such_  a douche,” she said. “Just because he’s in Corporate, he thinks he can do anything around here.”

Deeks had felt a spark of kinship with the woman since the moment he’d realized she’d been kicking the shit out of the copier, and now that she’d voiced his exact sentiments about one of the senior associates he most loathed, he decided that he definitely liked her. Shifting the files awkwardly to cradle them in one arm, he extended his free hand. “Marty Deeks, junior associate over in Family Law.”

She shook his hand before responding – and he noted she had a surprisingly firm grip. “Nell Jones, junior in Copyrights with a sub-specialty in E-commerce.”

“Nice,” he murmured appreciatively. “I thought you looked familiar, but I have to admit I didn’t know your name.”

“It’s a big firm, no worries,” she said, waving off his apology. “I can’t say I had a name to put with your face before now either.”

“Well, Nell,” he started, “what do you say we see if we can patch this monster up and get it running again? I have a bit of a knack for fixing these things when they get out of whack. In fact, some might call me the Xerox whisperer.”

She snorted out a laugh before she could stop herself and was still giggling when she gestured for him to enter the copy room ahead of her. “Please, lead on. Even if fixing this takes awhile,  _anything_  would be better than heading down to that hellhole that passes for a copy room in Arbitration.”

He set his stack of case files down on the long table at the back of the room before turning and crouching in front of the jammed machine. “My thoughts exactly,” he murmured under his breath. “Alright…now, just before you started whaling on this thing, what was the last thing you tried?“

She knelt next to him and started showing him what had gone wrong, and explaining the various things she’d done in attempting to fix it and he opened several of the compartments on the machine’s front as he listened to her. Before either of them knew it, more than an hour had passed with them working companionably on the various jams and alerts that the copier’s digital screen kept throwing at them. At last, Deeks closed the final cover and urged Nell to re-start the machine. When it whirred to life with a soft hum, and the start screen displayed its normal options, Nell whooped with glee and hugged him impulsively before stepping back. “Sorry – that’s just a  _huge_  relief.”

“No need to apologize. I’m just as relieved as you are,” he said. “Now, since you were here first, I’ll let you finish – just come find me and let me know when you’re done, okay? I’m down that way,” he pointed in the direction he’d come from initially. “Take a right at the end of the corridor, and I’m the fourth door on the left.”

“Thanks Marty,” she said with a smile as he scooped up his case files and started back out the copy room door to head back to his office. While he was waiting for her to finish he could at least respond to some of the massive email backlog he’d accrued over the course of the afternoon while he’d been buried in the paperwork for this affidavit. “I owe you.”

“Just leave me some toner, and we’ll be square.”

“You got it,” she smiled at him and then turned her attention to her copying as he walked back down the hall.

 

* * *

 

He didn’t think too much about the copy room incident, or Nell, over the next couple of weeks – although he did notice her more frequently when they passed each other in the halls. They’d exchange a wave and a smile whenever they spotted one another, but their paths didn’t cross again directly until the day that someone stole his lunch out of the refrigerator in the main break room.

“Really?!” he groaned, slamming the door of the fridge shut with perhaps a bit more force than necessary, as it opened again immediately, rebounding into his elbow with a jolt. “Dammit!”

“I feel like the shoe is on the other foot somehow,” a wry voice sounded from behind him and he turned to see Nell leaning against the doorway to the break room. “Let me guess, you’re  _not_  a Frigidaire whisperer.”

“Ha ha,” he said grumpily. “No. Someone stole my lunch – I can’t believe I even just said that. This is a law firm, not high school. Who  _does_  that?!”

“Probably one of the criminal lawyers,” she shrugged. “Which is…ironic…but they  _do_  always seem to be hungrier than anybody else. Half of them never seem to take a lunch break.”

“Well, whoever it is, the joke’s on them – it was an organic hazelnut butter and mango-chutney marmalade sandwich.” At Nell’s faint look of distaste, he continued. “I know, I know…I like them though. But I’m guessing whoever took it will be regretting it right about now.”

“Can’t say I blame them,” she quipped. He pretended to pout a bit at her reaction and she chuckled, before a look of excitement crossed her face. “Hey – actually, this is great!”

“It is?”

“Yeah. I’m taking you to lunch,” she said with a decisive nod of her head. “You helped me with the copier awhile back, and I still owe you.”

He tried to shrug her off – she really didn’t need to feel indebted to him for that. “That did me as much good as it did you, you don’t owe me anything.”

“Aw, c’mon Marty – it’ll be nice to get out of here for a bit. The walls of my office are starting to feel like they’re closing in on me, and there’s a new food truck that’s been parking just down the block that I’ve been dying to try. C’mooon.”

He thought about it for another moment – he really didn’t have any alternatives unless he wanted to scrounge in his desk for a leftover granola bar, a thought that held about zero appeal. “Alright, lead the way.”

“Yes! Just wait here a sec and I’ll grab my purse,” she said before darting out the door and down the hall towards the Copyright division. She was back practically as soon as she’d left and they made their way to the elevators. It was as easy to fall back into conversation with her as it had been the night they’d worked on the copier together, and they chatted all the way down in the elevator and across the wide, sprawling plaza in front of their office building as they headed for the bank of food trucks parked on the far side.

After they’d gotten their order they sat on a low concrete wall at the edge of the plaza, sharing bits and pieces of their backgrounds over their – amazingly good – shrimp curry. They talked about how long each of them had been at the firm – he was in his fourth year, she was just starting her second. He learned about what had drawn her to Copyright Law and told her what had pulled him into Family Law. She told him a bit about her large family – all of them back in the Midwest – and he shared, a bit more reluctantly, his own stories of being an only child growing up right there in L.A. (Though he carefully left out some of the more “broken” bits of the broken home he’d come from – those were for another day, or never).

They commiserated over the miserable seasons that both of their favorite sports teams – the Clippers for him, the Vikings for her – had recently gone through, and bonded over some of their favorite spots for surfing, something neither of them got enough time to do. Frankly, he’d been surprised when she’d said she was into it and he said as much.

“Yeah, I know, I know…I don’t really seem like the type, right?” She shrugged and took a sip of her lemonade before continuing. “I wasn’t at all, not for the first couple of years after I moved out here after law school. Only started picking it up a year ago – my boyfriend loves it, and he wanted to teach me. At first I went along with it so we could spend more time together, but now I absolutely  _love_  it, and,” she said with a smirk, “I’m just as good as he is and he’s been surfing for years.”

Deeks laughed. “That’s impressive after only a year. He must be a good teacher.”

“Maybe I’m just a quick learner.”

“Touché.” He saluted her with his own drink before asking, “So what does he do, your boyfriend? Other than hang around and be a beach bum?”

Nell chattered away as they got rid of their trash and headed back towards the office, telling him about the tech startup her boyfriend – he thought she said the guy’s name was Eric – founded and runs. From the sound of it, he’s some sort of cyber-genius who develops software the inner workings of which would no doubt leave Deeks baffled, but awed.

When the elevator opened on their floor and they prepared to go their separate ways, he found that he was truly sorry to see the lunch hour come to an end. He turned to Nell with a smile. “Thanks, I really enjoyed that. We’ll have to do it again sometime.”

She returned his smile with a grin of her own. “I’d like that, Marty. There are too many out-and-out sharks in this place. The few real people need to stick together.” And with a wink and a wave, she was gone.

 

* * *

 

 

Spending time with Nell was fun, and easy, and before Deeks knew it, their lunches had become a standing weekly tradition. They continued to swap stories and – even though their specialties were quite different – they often tried to offer each other advice on tricky cases (though without treading over the line of attorney-client privilege, of course). Deeks knew he tended to be kind of a loner – it wasn’t that he didn’t have friends, but the close ones were few and far between, and most of them were old law school buddies and a couple of cops he’d gotten to know in the earlier part of his career when he’d been in the public defender’s office. Nell was refreshingly different, and, as the weeks turned into months, he started to suspect that she’d kind of “adopted” him. He was surprised to find that he didn’t really mind. It was actually a two-for-one deal, as it turned out, because it wasn’t long before she’d introduced him to Eric and he and Deeks had become surfing buddies.

He knew for sure that he and Nell had reached some sort of pseudo-sibling status when she started pestering him about the fact that none of his girlfriends seemed to last more than a few weeks. He shrugged it off most of the time, replying that he wasn’t really looking or that he just didn’t have time for anything serious because of his caseload, but the speculative look in Nell’s eyes during most of those conversations signaled that she wasn’t really buying his excuses.

So he wasn’t all that shocked when, one day over lunch, she suggested setting him up on a blind date. He groaned at her before levelling her with his best courtroom glare. “Seriously, Nell? I’m too old for that kind of thing.”

She glared right back at him, giving as good as she got, and pointing at him emphatically. “You’re too old to be alone, Marty, is what’s what.”

“Way to bruise a man’s ego, Jones,” he muttered, suddenly a lot less hungry than he’d been just a moment ago.

“C’mon, you  _know_  I didn’t mean it like that,” she said, her gaze softening. “I just care about you, you know? You’re my friend. I want you to be happy.”

He sighed, rolling the kinks out of his shoulders before looking back at her. “What’s her name?”

The squeal of delight Nell let out at that moment was almost enough to make up for the aggravation he was feeling at being set up on what he was sure was going to be a bust of a date.  _Almost_. But as Nell went on and on, describing the friend she wanted to fix him up with – an assistant curator at the Getty who apparently loved horror films almost as much as he did, and who also had an unhealthy obsession with the Clippers – the aggravation began to fade.

As he listened to Nell, he realized with a start that the last time he’d even been out on a date was almost two months ago, and while it was true he’d been bogged down with a nasty, high stakes custody battle between two high profile celebrities for most of that time – their firm had been representing the wife, an actress, against her producer-husband – he was going to start to become nothing  _but_  his work if he wasn’t careful. Nell, it seemed, had seen this before he had, and he suddenly felt a rush of gratitude towards his friend.

“So, I was thinking,” Nell was saying, a wide grin on her face, “maybe a double-date with me and Eric would be best. That way, on the off-chance it  _doesn’t_  go well, it won’t be as awkward.”

 _Or it will be twice as uncomfortable, if it’s going badly_ , he mused, but refrained from voicing the thought. Instead, he smiled at Nell fondly. “The things I do for you, Nell-bell.”

She arched a brow at him. “Well, I can tell you one thing you can do for me.”

“Mm?”

“Don’t ever call me Nell-bell again.”

He chuckled at that. “Yes ma’am.”

 

* * *

 

 

_A little over three months later…_

Nell scurried down the hall towards the copy room, looking at her watch and groaning when she saw how late it already was. Her senior associate, Ms. Lange, had handed her a tall stack of paperwork for their current case just before the end of the business day, and it had taken her a couple of hours to plow through it all. She just wanted to get home and have a late dinner with Eric, and then maybe the world’s longest bubble bath (also, probably, with Eric), and as soon as she’d copied this stack of files, she’d be able to get out of there.

The offices were nearly deserted and the hallways quiet as she passed through the firm’s different divisions – which is what allowed her to hear it so clearly as she drew closer to the copy room.“It” being the insistent, and irregular, thumping emanating from the small room. Her patience was already worn thin, and when  _two_  voices began to utter muffled curses, the last of her restraint snapped.  _Parish_ , she thought, narrowing her eyes at the copy room’s closed door.  _Great, just **great**._ Unwilling to wait while the firm’s super-douche made the copy room his personal “boink zone” –  _again_  – and even less interested in using the copy room in Arbitration, Nell marched up to the door and rapped on it sharply. Senior associate or not, she was  _done_  with dealing with this behavior from him.

“ _Shit_ ,” a voice hissed from inside the room, followed by an array of scuffling sounds that she could only hope were two people putting their clothes back on.

“Okay, Parish,” she said, shifting the pile of files into the crook of her left arm and putting her right hand on the doorknob. “You and whatever flavor-of-the-month you’ve got in there have till the count of three to get yourselves together and get  _out_ , because some of us actually still have work to do. One…two…thr-” But before she could get the final word out, the door swung open to reveal one of the room’s occupants. “Marty?!” Nell squeaked. She couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d tried. Her friend’s hair was tousled and his clothing was unkempt in a way that very clearly was  _not_  due to trying to repair a copier. And though she couldn’t see the other person in the room, she could hear them moving around and cursing under their breath.

“Uh, hey Nell…yeah…sorry. This is…uh…wow…embarrassing,” he carded his hands through his hair, which only caused it to ruffle up in several new directions, and reached out for the pile of documents in her hands. “Listen, why don’t you just leave those with me – I’ll take care of them and drop them off in your office before I leave.”

Before she could even begin to form a response to that – not that she really had a clue what she was going to say – she caught a flash of long, wavy brown hair and a familiar jacket moving about the room behind Marty, and her jaw dropped further. “Kensi?!”

Her friend cursed again – now that Nell knew who was in the room with Marty, she recognized who had uttered the “ _shit_ ” she’d heard when she’d knocked – before pulling the door open wider and stepping up closer to Marty. “Um, Nell. Hi?”

Marty cleared his throat, not quite meeting Nell’s eyes. “Kens knew I was working late and brought me dinner. She wanted to surprise me, and…um…” he trailed off and the three of them stood in silence for the space of a couple of heartbeats before Nell was able to kick her brain back into gear.

“Okay. This  _is_  really awkward. Y’know what, I’m just gonna go down to Arbitration and take care of this there,” Nell gestured to her pile of documents and started to back away from the copy room. “Then I’m going to go home, and forget this ever happened.” She’d only taken a few steps down the hall before a thought occurred to her and she swung around to face them again. “Hang on a sec. Bringing him dinner? Kensi, what are you even  _doing_  here? I mean, I  _know_  what you were do-” she cut herself off before she could finish  _that_  particular sentence and tried again. “I  _mean_ , I thought that the date I set you guys up on didn’t go very well. You two didn’t seem to hit it off at all.” (Nell remembers the bickering – over expensive sushi at Crustacean, no less – that had ended in a less than happy evening for the couple in question).

Though she’d addressed Kensi, it was actually Marty who answered. “Well, that’s true – at first. But, uh, she was pretty hard to forget,” and Nell noticed that by this point, he’d slipped his arm around Kensi’s waist and she was leaning against his shoulder. He glanced down at the brunette with a wide, warm smile and didn’t take his eyes off her while he continued talking to Nell. “We bumped into each other again about a month or so ago and decided to give it another try.”

“Things went much better the second time around,” Kensi chimed in, seemingly just as unwilling to break eye contact with Marty as he was with her. “Sorry we didn’t say anything. We just didn’t want to jinx it,” she finally turned and looked at Nell, an apologetic expression on her face.

“Pff,” Nell waved her hand dismissively at both of them. “I’m happy if you’re happy – both of you. But  _you_ ,” she pointed at Marty, “owe me.”

“Hm?” he looked up at her, still seemingly distracted by Kensi’s proximity.

“For being right about you two all along,” she smirked at him as she walked back to them and deposited the stack of case files in Marty’s hands. “I believe you said something about copying these for me? We need them in triplicate, by the way. Fully collated.”

Before he could say anything, she winked at him and hugged Kensi quickly, then headed back in the direction of her office. She had a boyfriend and a bubble bath to get home to and she wasn’t going to wait another minute. Behind her, she could hear Marty’s low chuckle before he called after her.

“Well played, Jones. Well played.”

 

–//–FIN–//–


End file.
